Chapter 2 THE MAN SHE WAS PROMISED TO

I did not turn.

For a few seconds, that was all I had left, and I used it carefully.

He had chosen the only seat touching my elbow out of nineteen empty ones, then spoken the only sentence in the language capable of taking my morning away from me. The least I could do was refuse to give him the satisfaction of seeing what it had done.

So I kept my eyes on Aldiss.

The man at the front of the room was explaining the collapse of a treaty to two hundred students who had already stopped pretending to care. His jacket was the colour of old tobacco, his glasses kept slipping down his nose, and every few minutes he pushed them back with the same finger.

My eyes blocked out everything he said.

Ten seconds passed.

Then twenty. My heart did the counting and it was loud.

The stranger still did not move.

“Aldiss goes another forty minutes,” I said. “You’ll want a pen. He likes it when people take notes. It’s the only thing about us he likes.”

That got nothing.

I glanced down at my notebook.

"You're not going to ask?” He asked.

"I'm going to listen to the lecture."

“You didn’t stand up.”

I turned my head.

He had moved his head perhaps ten degrees, no more, so that we were two students having a whispered disagreement about the Treaty of Ryswick. But his attention remained on Aldiss.

“Should I have?”

“Most people would.”

“Most people don’t know whether the person sitting beside them is dangerous.”

The corner of his mouth shifted into a smirk.

“That’s true.”

The answer irritated me.

I studied him properly for the first time. There was no longer any profit in not doing it, and I wanted the inventory also.

He was younger than the shoes had suggested. Twenty-three, twenty-four. Dark hair, thick enough to fall slightly forward when he moved, though he had not moved enough for me to know whether he kept it that way. His face had the kind of symmetry that made you understand why people stared and then pretend they hadn’t. Strong jaw. Straight nose. A mouth that looked too well formed for the expression he was wearing, which was almost nothing.

He was handsome. Annoyingly so.

His hands looked like those of a man whose family's money had never required him to lift anything. I had known a hundred men who looked like that. I was raised in a house that manufactured them. Every last one of them had been afraid of my father, and this one was sitting in a lecture hall in a town with one road, and was not afraid of anything I could see.

"I'll save you the first four questions." He said it to the front of the room, not to me. "I have been here eleven days. I have not been inside your flat. I know where you park, because you park badly. And your friend with the hoodie, the tall one, knows nothing. The only reason he is still ordinary."

"Say his name."

"No."

"You don't know it."

"I know it." He let that sit exactly as long as it needed to. "I'm not going to say it, and you don't want me to."

I turned the pen on the desk until it lay square with the edge of the page. 

He hadn’t asked whether Theo mattered to me. He already knew enough to understand that he did.

“You’ve been watching him too.”

“Only because he’s always with you.”

“I’ll need a better answer.”

“It is the one you’re getting.”

I closed my notebook.

"You were at the Hallam garage on Tuesday," I said. If he was pretending, this was where the seams would show.

"No."

"Green van outside. Blue overalls."

"There's no van. There's a Corolla the owner's son drives. He wears a fleece,” he paused. “And I wasn't there." 

He turned his head the rest of the way and looked at me properly for the first time. "Ask me a real question. That was clumsy."

It was clumsy. It was also information. He had corrected the detail instead of agreeing with it, which meant he had been to Hallam, and it meant he didn’t need me to think well of him. Both of those were worse than a lie would have been.

I had spent two years being nobody's problem. I had been careful with strangers the way I’d been with a stove. What I had not been in two years was outmatched. The feeling came with a horrible familiarity, like a coat I had grown out of and could still get my arms into.

Aldiss let us out eleven minutes early. It was something he had never done before or since. I had thought about that more than a person should. The last ordinary minutes I had were taken from me by a man who wanted to beat the rain to his car.

I went up the aisle inside the crowd, not looking back. He came out of the row and put himself at my shoulder like we had arrived together. In a corridor with two hundred people pushing toward two doors he could have said anything at all and nobody would have caught a word of it.

"Don't worry." He said it almost pleasantly. "I'm not here for your father."

I stopped in my tracks. Somebody’s bag hit my hip. Somebody said sorry. I said nothing.

An error. That was what it was. Two years of never stopping, and one sentence undid it, because it was the wrong sentence. A man sent by my father would open with “Your father wants you home”. A man sent by anybody else had no reason to bring him up at all. He had told me something mind-boggling in order to buy the next four minutes, and it worked. He had known it would.

"Outside," I spat.

The east walk ran along that side of Hoyt under a stone arcade with ivy coming through it. There was a bin at the end that nobody had emptied since I got to this school. I put my back to the wall out of a habit I had believed was gone. He watched me do it, and then he stepped back and gave me the extra foot I had taken.

Out on the grass, forty feet off, Theo was going the other way with his hood up. He saw me and raised a hand. I raised mine back. He kept walking, because it was Thursday and there was nothing wrong.

"Your name?” I asked.

"Dario."

"Your full name.”

"You already know it  or you'd be asking differently."

"Say it."

"Dario De Luca."

I forgot to breathe for a second.

I had been hit in the face. That was a different thing. It was loud and it was over. This was the other one, where the ground held and everything standing on it rearranged itself while you watched.

De Luca. Two words that were not permitted in my father's house. Two words my mother said once, in a kitchen, in a voice I had never heard her use and did not hear again, three days before the last argument of her marriage. Two words I had carried out of a study at two in the morning with a passport in one pocket and a notebook in the other that I had never been able to read.

Rain came off the gutter above us in a rope, hitting the stone in the same place, over and over.

"Which one are you?” I asked, my voice steady.

"Dominic's son."

"Dominic has one son."

"He does."

"Then finish it. You've spent eleven days on this. You might as well enjoy the part you came for."

And here was the thing I could not get past afterward, for weeks, in cars, at three in the morning. He did not enjoy it. He had every right to take that moment but he stood there with his coat over his arm and gave it to me flat, the way a doctor would give a result he had given four hundred times and had never once found a good way to say.

"I'm the man your father promised you to."

Somewhere across the quad a boy was shouting a name that was not mine, and would never be mine, in any of its versions.

Tony De Luca. Forty-four years old at the funeral where I heard it. Gold at the wrist. A laugh that released half a second before anything funny had happened. Putting his hand on the back of your chair without touching you.

I built two years on that man. A name off a diner menu, a town with one road, a coat I fixed a car in, a friend who bought me pastries I didn't like so that I would complain about them. All of it standing on a sentence I overheard between two soldiers who were not talking to me and had no reason on this earth to be accurate.

I did not run from a marriage.

I ran from the wrong groom.

"You've gone very quiet," he observed.

"How long have you known where I was?"

"That isn't the question you want."

"Answer it anyway."

"I told you. Eleven days." He shifted the coat to his other arm. "The question you want is how I found you at all, and you're going to hate it. It isn't clever and it isn't your fault. You were never careless. You did all of it right." He looked at me like a piece of luck he hadn't decided how to feel about. "You just weren't what I was looking for."

Then he reached toward me.

It was nothing. The strap of my bag had come off my shoulder and was going. He moved to catch it as anyone would. I had his wrist before the decision reached me.

I knew exactly how hard I held. There was a place below the base of the thumb where the bones sit close together, and pressure there was uncomfortable for a second and unbearable by the fourth. I took him past the fourth and kept going. My father didn't teach me that. My father paid for it and then stood at the door of the room, twice a week, for four years, and never came in.

He didn't pull back or try to do the twist, where the other hand came up. His arm remained in my fist with his coat still folded and looked down at where I was holding him like a machine he wanted to take apart later, at home, with the right tools.

"Adductor pollicis," he scoffed. "You want to be a little lower."

"I want you to say something else."

"You're leaving a mark."

"Yes."

"That's all right."

The rain kept coming off the gutter. His pulse was perfectly steady under my fingers. I hated him for it in a way I could not have defended to anybody.

I let go gingerly.

He didn't rub his wrist, which I noticed, and he didn't look at it, which I noticed more, because not looking was a choice and rubbing was not. He put his coat straight. Then he picked up the strap of my bag with two fingers and set it back on my shoulder. I did nothing to stop him. I hadn't been able to explain that part, not to Bianca, not to myself, not later.

"Alessia," he said.

Nobody had said it in two years. Not Theo, who calls me Vance when he's being funny. Not Nell, who had never once written a name on a cup. Not Bianca, who said “girl”, or nothing, or “hello you”. I had begun to think of it as something in a drawer at my mother's house, wrapped in a cloth with the good silver. Here it was in a stranger's mouth in the middle of a wet Thursday, and it fit.

"Monday," he continued. "Same lecture, same row. You won't be there. That's fine." He stepped out from under the arcade. The rain took him immediately, and he had no apparent opinion about it. "When you're finished running, I'll be somewhere you can find me. I'd rather you came to me."

"Why would I do that?"

"I'm not the worst thing looking for you." He was already walking. "And you're going to want to ask your mother a question. She isn't going to answer it."

He said it over his shoulder, without stopping. That was the part that had never stopped working on me. Not the threat. There wasn't one. He gave me my mother in a line and kept walking like someone who had remembered something on the way to his car.

I got to the end of the arcade before my hands started. I put them in my pockets and stood in the doorway of a building I have loved for the time I’ve been here while eleven hundred people went past me to lunch.

The fourteenth. We usually spoke on the fourteenth. It was the ninth. I had five days to sit with a question I could not ask. I already knew, standing there with wet stone at my back, that I was going to spend all five of them contemplating how my mother would have an answer for it.

She did. It was trouble.